The following computer-generated description may contain errors and does not represent the quality of the book:This book is a history, and not a dissertation. Is it founded on the knowledge and critical appreciation of the original texts? The reader will be able to judge of this, on reading the notes. As to the text, criticism has little to do with it: the four first centuries of Rome occupy comparatively little of it. We will here say a few words as to the long controversy to which these centuries have given rise.

The doubt whether the traditional story of the origin of Rome is history, is not a doubt of yesterday. It was one of the first subjects to which the spirit of criticism applied itself on its awaking. After Rome had ceased to command the world by the swords of the legions, she ruled it by two texts canon law, and civil la. She published this law not only as truth, as written reason but also as authority. She sought legitimacy for it in the ancient domination of the empire, in its history. Men, after awhile, began to interrogate this history. The precursor of Erasmus, Lorenzo Valla gave the signal for this in the beginning of the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth, a friend of Erasmus undertook the examination of Livy, but still with the same caution and timidity with which his prudent friend wrote upon the Bible. This critic, the first who occupied the chair of Belles Lettres in the college of France(1521), was a Swiss, the fellow countryman of Zuinglius.